(article) Why funerals demand a body

"As religious connections have frayed, and our desire to confront loss has waned, the funeral service has changed accordingly.... Thomas Lynch, an undertaker and poet, and the author of the acclaimed essay collection “The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade,” believes that in adopting these newer rituals Americans have lost something important. In a new book, “The Good Funeral,” written with theologian Thomas G. Long, he makes a passionate argument for a return to the labor of the funeral—to the presence of a body and to mourners playing a role in the physical disposal of their dead, be it through burial or cremation..." "LYNCH: I see the fireside and the graveside as equivalents. That’s where we should go with them. To the edge of whatever oblivion we’re consigning them to. Whatever that space is, it’s made sacred by the fact that we’re putting our dead in it.... If you have a bunch of people gathered around an open piece of ground, and you lean [a shovel] towards someone, you don’t have to give them the operating instructions. They know what to do with it!"

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/10/20/why-funerals-demand-body/nepmNQdKobLgIbdnu1aTDP/story.html